I'm a theater lover. I am happiest when I am sitting in a theater. Or talking about theater. Or reading about theater. Or now blogging about it. If you’re reading this, you're probably a theater lover too and I hope you’ll keep me company as I blog my way through each Broadway season.

May 12, 2018

"A Brief History of Women" and "Summer and Smoke" May Be Minor Pieces by Master Writers But They're Still Worth Seeing

We theater junkies can be a demanding lot. And sometimes we
let our pursuit of the excellent get in the way of our enjoying the very good. At
least that's how I've been feeling about two shows by master playwrights that
recently opened to middling reviews. I, too, had carps about them and yet I also
left each theater grateful that I'd had the chance to see each show. Here's why:

A Brief History of Women: Alan Ayckbourn has a reputation
for clever works like Absurd Person Singular and The Norman Conquests that play with form while tickling the funny bone. But the laughs in A Brief History of
Women, Aykbourn's81st play over a
nearly 60-year career, tend more toward rueful chuckles than the out-and-out
guffaws that so many of his other plays elicit. Or as the couple sitting next
to me lamented, "it isn't as funny as he usually is."

Still, Ayckbourn, who also directed this production which
is playing as part of the Brits Off Broadway festival at the 59E59 Theaters
through May 27, hasn't lost his knack for poking behind the stiff-upper-lip
facade of Britain's middle and upper classes. This time he does it through the
changing fortunes of an English manor house and the local everyman Anthony
Spates whose life intersects with it from his service as a teenaged footman to
the noble family that owns the house in 1925 through his tenure as the manager of
the place and the caretaker of its legacy when the building becomes a posh hotel in the
1980s.

There are amusing bits along the way, most of them delivered
with deliciously hammy relish by Russell Dixon, who, like most of the six-member
cast, assumes different roles as the house's function changes over the years. But
it is Antony Eden's quietly understated performance as Spates that anchors the
play and sent me away thinking back over the places I've lived and the people
who filled those empty buildings and also my heart. As I tweeted when I got
home, A Brief History of Women may not be top-shelf Ayckbourn but even generic
Ayckbourn has what it takes to hit the spot.

Summer and Smoke: As big a Tennessee Williams fan as I
consider myself to be, I had never seen Summer and Smoke until my friend Ellie
and I recently attended the Transport Group production that is playing at Classic
Stage Company through May 25. I'm not sure it's the best introduction to this
play because director Jack Cummings III has created such a minimalist
production that characters actually have to mime eating ice cream cones and playing cards because
there are no props or set, except for two paintings and a few chairs.

But what the play does have is yet another glorious
performance by Marin Ireland who portrays Alma Winemiller, the restless but repressed
daughter of a minister in a small Mississippi Delta town during the early years
of the 20th century. Alma, whose name she likes to tell people is Spanish for
soul, yearns for both a more cultured life and for the affections of her next
door neighbor John, the dissolute son of the town doctor.

Nathan Darrow is alluring as John, whose inner turmoil
rivals Alma's and who is drawn to her but willing to settle for something less
than the challenge she offers. There are other good performances too, including
Tina Johnson as the townbusybody and
Barbara Walsh as Alma's mother, another restless woman who is locked in a bad
marriage that has driven her mad.

But the play's success rests on Alma's shoulders. The character has often
been played by an actress pretending to be homely but Ireland's Alma is simultaneously aware
of her beauty and frightened of it and of what the feelings inside her might
unleash if fully acknowledged. This take on the roll, the acquiescent undoing of an
intelligent and sensual woman, deepens its poignancy. Some scholars say Alma was
Williams' favorite female character and Ireland makes it easy to see why—and why it's worth seeing this production.